On Wednesday, Senator Ed Markey announced a piece of legislation he hopes will gain traction in Congress to help reduce gun violence nationwide. The aptly named Handgun Trigger Safety Act would introduce recognition technology to firearms allowing for just the owner to discharge it, while allotting $10 million of the federal budget to go towards gun violence research. The National Rifle Association, though, isn’t quite as taken with Markey’s bill as the Senator from Massachusetts is.
BostInno reached out directly to the NRA to find out what their thoughts were on Senator Markey’s measures and, given the organizations staunch lobbying on behalf of the Second Amendment, if they think the bill will impede at all on a citizen’s right to bear and keep arms.
Said NRA spokesperson Jacqueline Isaacs to BostInno in an email:
Sen. Markey should focus on serious solutions such as improving the records in the National Instant Check System and fixing our broken mental health system to make sure that criminals and those adjudicated mentally incompetent don’t have access to guns in the first place.
Translation: Figure out a way to keep guns from getting in the wrong hands so that you don’t have to implement recognition technology.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check System is the process through which potential gun buyers must adhere to determine their respective eligibility to purchase a firearm.
According to the FBI, the following criteria are grounds for denial of purchase. If a person:
- “Has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year
- Is under indictment for a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year
- Is a fugitive from justice
- Is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance
- Has been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution
- Is an alien illegally or unlaw-fully [sic] in the United States or who has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa.
- Has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions
- Having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced U.S. citizenship
- Is subject to a court order that restrains the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of such intimate partner
- Has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.”
There is also an appeal process should one be prohibited from purchase based on inaccurate records of a person’s criminal background, or lack thereof, or a person’s identity and citizenship.
The data below shows the number of firearm purchase denials from November 30, 1998 through January 31, 2014. According to the statistics, over 1 million people have been prohibited from buying guns during that span with 57.14 percent of those due to them being “convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year or a misdemeanor punishable by more than two years.” Another 10.32 percent were reported as fugitives from justice and 9.9 percent convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
The NRA failed to specify points of interest that Senator Markey may want to consider focusing in terms of revamping the NICS.
